Gwendolyn Brooks --awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1950 for her
second volume of verse, named poet laureate of the state of
Illinois in 1968, succeeding Carl Sandburg, and appointed to the
prestigious National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1976, -- was born in Topeka, Kansas on June 7, 1917, the granddaughter of a runaway slave, and grew up in the slums of
Chicago.Her parents were David Anderson Brooks, a janitor, and
Keziah Corinne (Wims) Brooks, formerly an elementary
schoolteacher. From the time she was one month old, Ms. Brooks
lived with her family, which later came to include a brother,
Raymond, in the sprawling black ghetto on the South Side of
Chicago.

Her economically deprived but respectable
upbringing was enriched by her parents’ love of education and
culture. Keziah brooks composed songs and “storyettes” to
amuse her children; David Brooks read them daily selections from
his prized set of Harvard Classics. Encouraged by her parents,
Ms. Brooks read widely and was especially fond of Lucy Maud
Montgomery, the Canadian novelist who wrote Anne of Green
Gables, and Paul Lawrence Dunbar, the black poet.

A solitary child, she preferred the company
of her books to that of her classmates at the Forestville
Elementary School and, later, at the more elite Frances Willard
School. “I was very ill-adjusted,” she told Phyl Garland in
an interview for Ebony (July 1968). “I couldn’t
skate, I was never a good rope-jumper, and I can remember
thinking I must be a very inferior kind of child since I
couldn’t play jacks.”

Despite her intellectual bent, Ms. Brooks’
scholastic achievements were, by her own estimation, “very
poor.” “At my best, I was average.” She admitted to
garland. “I spent more time brooding over my relations with
other children than I did thinkig about my lessons.” She found
it so difficult to adjust that she attended three different high
schools. Her overriding pleasure was “putting rhymes
together,” in her composition notebooks, which she filled with
“careful rhymes” and “lofty meditations” on nature,
love, and death.

When she was thirteen, one of her poems
“Eventide,” was published in American Childhood, a
popular children’s magazine of the period. Urged by her
mother, she sent samples of her work to James Weldon Johnson and
Langston Hughes and received encouraging comments from both men.
After graduating from Englewood High school in 1934, she
completed her formal education at Wilson Junior College, now
known as Kennedy-King College, in 1936, majoring in English
literature. Gwendolyn Brooks had been a regular
contributor to “Lights and Shadows,” a column of miscellany
in the Chicago Defender, the city’s black daily
newspaper. When she obtained her college degree, she hoped for
work as a Defender reporter.

When she was not hired, she
found temporary work as a domestic in a North Shore home, an
embittered experience. She then worked as a typist for a
“spiritual adviser” who, she recalled, sold holy
thunderbolts, lucky charms, and numbers” from his storefront
church.

In the late 1930s Brooks joined the NAACP
Youth council and soon became its publicity director. “Those
were some of my happiest days because I had never thought I’d
have a whole bunch of friends, people who seemed to like me and
thought that there was something to me,” she told Garland.
“It was then that my beautiful social life began.” At one,
Youth Council meeting Ms. Brooks met another promising writer,
Henry L. Blakely. The two were married on September 17, 1939 and
had two children, Henry, Jr. and Nora.

Two
years later (1941), Brooks signed up for a poetry
workshop at the South Side Community Art center in
Chicago. At the workshop under the direction of Inez
Cunningham Stark, an editor of poetry magazine, students
were often exposed to harsh criticism from their peers,
but Gwendolyn found the honesty and openness
constructive to her work and, with Ms. Stark’s patient
assistance, she learned to master the techniques of
modern poetry.

In 1943 the young poet earned the
Poetry Workshop Award at the summer Midwestern Writers’
Conference at Northwestern University; the following year she
won the top prize at the annual Writers’ Conference in
Chicago.

“Poetry was not the whole of [her] life,”
however, as she revealed in her autobiography, Report from
Part One, (Broadside Press, 1972), for in the early 1940s
“partying . . . was most important.” “My husband and I
knew writers, knew painters, knew pianist and dancers and
actresses, knew photographers galore,” she wrote. “There
were always weekend parties to be attended, where we merry
Bronzevillians could find each other and earnestly philosophize
sometimes on into the dawn, over martinis and Scotch and coffee,
and an ample buffet. . . . Conversation was our ‘mary jane.’
Of course, in that time, it was believed, still, that the
society could be prettied, quieted, cradled, sweetened,
if only people talked enough, glared at each other yearningly
enough, waited enough.”

In the mid-1940s such established literary
magazines as Harper’s, the Saturday Review of
Literature, the Yale Review, and Poetry, began
to publish Ms. Brooks’ poems. Encouraged, she submitted
nineteen poems to Harper & Brothers, which agreed to publish
them on the recommendation of Richard Wright, the black
novelist. In his appraisal Wright said: “[Ms. Brooks] easily
catches the pathos of petty destinies, the whimper of the
wounded, the tiny incidents that plague the lives of the
desperately poor, and the problem of common prejudice. . . .
There is not so much an exhibiting of Negro life to whites in
these poems as there is an honest human reaction to the pain
that lurks so carefully in the Black Belt.”

Gwendolyn Brooks was an "objective" poet,
one who has discovered the neglected miracles of everyday life.
A lifelong resident of Chicago Brooks wrote unflinchingly about
the lives of its impoverished blacks, particularly its women, in
wrenching portraits that are social documents as well as works
of art. Despite the narrow focus of her work, her poems have a
universal appeal.

"In my writing I am proud to feature and
their concerns, their troubles as well as their joys," she
said in an interview. "It is my privilege to present Negroes
not as curios, but as people."

"I wrote about what I saw and heard in the
street," Ms. Brooks told Paul M. Angle in an interview for Illinois
Bell (Summer 1967) magazine. “I lived in a small
second-floor apartment at the corner, and I could look first on
one side and then on the other. There was my material.” When
her A Street in Bronzeville, was published in 1945, it
attracted considerable attention from literary critics because
of its passion, authenticity, sincerity, and freshness.

Although
her poetic voice is objective, Gwendolyn Brooks--as an
observer--is never far from her action. On one level, of course,
Brooks is a protest poet, at least. since The Bean Eaters (1960)
and certainly her work after 1967; yet her protest evolves
through suggestion rather than through a bludgeon. Brooks
attempts to provide facts with little or embellishment or
interpretation. But the simple facts expressed uniquely and
simply can indeed be convincing that something is amiss and
needs more careful attention and likely a change for the better.

In 1946 and 1947 Brooks received a Guggenheim
Fellowship for creative writing and in 1946 a $1,000 grant in
literature from the National Institute of Arts and letters.
Mademoiselle magazine named her one of its Ten Women of 1945.

Her second volume of verse, Annie Allen
(Harper, 1949), firmly established Gwendolyn Brooks as an
important voice in contemporary American literature. Although
she had set out to make the book as “technically perfect” as
possible, she had felt free to experiment with a new form: the
sonnet-ballad. The book, a sequence of poems tracing the
progress to mature womanhood of a Bronzeville black girl,
examines the universal experiences of loneliness, loss, and
death as well as the abrasions of poverty. Reviewers singled out
"manicure" and "The Anniad," a long lyrical about the
marriage of her heroine, as having special merit.

To Blyden Jackson, who analyzed her work
years later in Black Poetry in America: Two Essays in
Historical Interpretation (1974), Annie Allen was
representative of Ms. Brooks’ method: the study “of the
flower in the crannied wall.” “Her genius operates within
its area of greatest strength,” he wrote, “the close
inspection of a limited domain, to reap from that inspection . .
. a view of life in which one may see a microscopic portion of
the universe intensely and yet, through that microscopic
portion, see all truth for the human condition wherever it
exists.” Annie Allen won for Brooks the Eunice Tietjens
Memorial Prize from Poetry magazine in 1949 and the
Pulitzer for poetry in 1950. It was the first time the award was
conferred on a black woman.

She orchestrated the theme of coming of age
in Maud Martha (Harper, 1953), a novel in the form of
thirty-four vignettes about the life of a young black girl
growing up in Chicago. Maud Martha is first presented as an
unhappy overweight, seven-year-old child, then as a
day-dreaming, introverted adolescent, and finally as a young
bride “in a sad gray building in a cold white world,”
married to a husband numbed by his struggle with “The Man.”
Her life, in the end, is devoid of dreams, little more than a
series of harsh confrontations with white society and regretful
glimpses of what might have been. As in Annie Allen, brooks’
portrayal of a seemingly simple and uneventful life fathomed
profound emotional and psychological depths.

Bronzeville Boys and Girls (Harper,
1956), an illustrated collection of thirty-six poems for
children, marked yet another departure for Gwendolyn Brooks.
Written with childlike simplicity, the poems dealt with the
everyday experiences common to all youngsters as well as those
peculiar to the city child (“These buildings are too close to
me./ I’d like to PUSH away./ I’d like to live in the
country,/ And spread my arms all day.”).

In The Bean Eaters (Harper 1960),
Brooks’ tone grew slightly more militant and satirical. Among
the poems in this, her most controversial volume to that date,
were a bitter recollection of the beating and shooting of Emmett
Till, a fifteen-year-old black, in 1955 and a moving description
of the violent racial confrontation in Little Rock, Arkansas
after a court-ordered integration order in 1957. “We Real
Cool,” one of her most famous poems, captures the frustration
and uncertain self-image of black urban youth. In its entirety
it reads: “W real cool. We/Left school. We/Lurk late.
We/Strike straight. We/Sing sin. We/Thin gin. We/Jazz June.
We/Die soon.”

Reviewing The Bean Eaters for the New
York Times Book Review (October 23, 1960), poet Harvey
Shapiro took Brooks to task for what he found to be “trite”
and “sentimental” social satire. He was more favorably
impressed by the conventional “Ballad of Rudolph Reed,” a
poem about a black man’s efforts to move into a white
neighborhood. Frederick Bock, in the Chicago Sunday Tribune
(June 5, 1960), was similarly disappointed by her “complacent
handling of a number of ambitious poems dealing with racial
themes.” On the other hand, for Herbert Burke, writing in
library Journal (April 15, 1960), The Bean Eaters had
“an impact which is both fresh and frightening.” A
representativesampling
of poems from The Bean Eaters, along with selections from
Annie Allen and A Street in Bronzeville and a
handful of new pieces was published under the title Selected
Poems (Harper 1963).

President
John Kennedy invited her to read at a Library of Congress poetry
festival in 1962.

Her first teaching job was a poetry workshop at Columbia College
(Chicago) in 1963.For six years beginning in 1963, Brooks
conducted poetry and fiction workshops and taught freshman
English and twentieth-century literature at Chicago’s Columbia
College, Elmhurst College, Northeastern Illinois State College,
and the University of Wisconsin, where she was Rennebohm
Professor of English. Although she believed that it was
impossible to teach anyone to how to write, she encouraged her
students to “write earnestly and personally” from their own
experiences.

“A writer must not be afraid to give himself to
life, of becoming involved with people,” she explained to
Lucia Mouat in an interview for the Christian Science Monitor
(November 27, 1967). “He must not just live for his own tiny
comforts but extend and expose himself even though he will be
hurt many times.”

In the spring of 1967 Gwendolyn Brooks
attended the Fisk University Writers’ Conference in Nashville,
Tennessee, where she met Ron Milner, Imamu Baraka (the former
LeRoi Jones), and other black writers. For two days she listened
and learned, awed, by the new spirit of self-confidence, pride,
and militancy of her fellow blacks. “It frightens me to
realize that if I had died before the age of fifty, I would have
died a ‘Negro” fraction,” she wrote in Report from part
One. If it hadn’t been for these young people, these young
writers who influenced me, I wouldn’t know what I know about
this society. By associating with them I know who I am. . . . My
stupidity was incredible. I hadn’t even read The
Autobiography of Malcolm X. I didn’t know what was going
on in the world.”

Having, as she put it, “rediscovered her
blackness,” Brooks returned to Chicago and was immediately
invited to a performance of Opportunity, please knock, an Alley
Theater Project that featured the Blackstone Rangers, a South
side street gang. Impressed by their raw talent, she organized a
poetry writing workshop for the Rangers. Soon her home became a
meeting place for young people interested in art and politics
particularly those interested in merging the concept of black
art with the ideology of Black Power. Ms. Brooks also sponsored
poetry competitions in elementary and high schools, usually
supplying the cash awards out of her won funds, participated in
open-air readings, and supported the Kuumba Workshop, an
experiential community theatre.

An integrationist during the 1940s and 1950s,
Brooks had subscribed to the Christian tenet that all people
were “really good.” Not anti-white, but, rather, pro-black,
her new attitude emphasized black self-reliance. She was, in her
own words, a “new integrationist,” as defined by Don L. lee
in his poem of that title:
“I/seek/integration/of/Negroes/with/black/people.” For
Brooks, it was a matter not of repudiating her past, but of
moving ahead into “at least the kindergarten of new
consciousness . . . and trudge-toward-progress.” Brooks
began to focus more on writing for African-American
people than writing about them for white audiences.

Her remarkable ability to change following
her “transformation” at Fisk University was reflected in her
next book of poems, In the Mecca (Harper 1968). The
thirty-page title poem describes a mother’s frantic search for
her lost daughter in the sprawling, decrepit apartment house,
The Mecca, a search that uncovered the desperate, often tragic
lives of the building’s inhabitants. Other poems, such as
“Malcolm X,” “The wall,” and “way-out-Morgan” were
even more militant.

The radical tone of the new poems was
underlined by their clipped, compressed lines, abstract word
patterns, and random rhymes. Hailing In the Mecca as “a
kind of Spoon River Anthology of the black ghetto,”
Bruce Cook, who reviewed it for the National Observer (September
9, 1968) applauded Brooks’ lifelike portraits and her “new
sureness . . . born of familiarity and nourished by
conviction.”

After publication of In the Mecca, Brooks
left Harper & Row for Broadside Press, a small, low-profit
black publishing house in Detroit, a decision that was praised
by black artists and intellectuals as an act of conscience. But
with the exception of Report From Part One, an
autobiographical collage, the Brooks titles published under the
Broadside imprint – Riot (1969), Family Pictures
(19700, Aloneness (1971), and Beckonings (1975)
– as well as The Tiger Wore White Gloves, a
children’s book published by Third World Press (1974), were
virtually ignored by the major reviewing media.

Committed to
the concept of black owned publishing houses, Brooks has
contributed both time and money to broadside press.

A “shy, unassuming” woman whose most
distinctive featurewas
her ‘soft, gentle, quizzical brown eyes, Gwendolyn Brooks
lived in a book-filed house in a working-class neighborhood on
the South Side of Chicago with her husband, Henry Blakely, a
businessman.Her
favorite recreation is reading. Less militant in recent years,
Brooks has concentrated on writing “a kind of poetry that will
appeal to all manner of blacks.” I don’t want to imitate
these young people,” she explained. “I have got to find a
way of writing that will accomplish my purpose but still sound
Gwendolynian.”

Ms. Brooks
conducted seminars, workshops, and readings at countless major
educational institutions across the country and taught at
several including the University of Wisconsin-Madison, City
College of New York, Columbia College of Chicago, Northeastern
Illinois University, and Elmhurst College. At the time of her
death, Ms. Brooks had been the Distinguished Professor of
English at Chicago State University for several years and the
Poet Laureate of Illinois since 1969.

Ms. Brooks’
lifelong career enhanced, enriched, and embraced language on an
international scale. She was awarded over 75 honorary doctorates
and was a much-sought after speaker known for her giving,
compassionate, and sometimes mischievous) spirit.

In 1997,
Mayor Richard M. Daley announced Gwendolyn Brooks Week in
conjunction with her 80th birthday. A special program
entitled Eighty Gifts was held at the Harold Washington Library
Center with presentations by 80 writers and performers from
across the globe. Other special honors include the Gwendolyn
Brooks Center for Black Literature and Creative Writing at
Chicago state University; the Gwendolyn Brooks Junior High
School in Harvey, Illinois as well as schools named after her in
Aurora and DeKalb, Illinois; the Gwendolyn Brooks Cultural
Center at Western Illinois University in Macomb, Illinois; the
Edward Jenner School Auditorium in Chicago’s Cabrini-Green
community, and the engraved listing of her name on the Carter G.
Woodson Regional Library in Chicago and the Illinois State
Library in Springfield.

Ms. Brooks had a
special commitment to young people and sponsored various poetry
awards, including the Illinois Poet Laureate Awards, an annual
events she developed and ran for over 30 years to honor young
writers from Illinois elementary schools and high schools. This
project, along with many other programs, contest, and events
were personally financed by Ms. Brooks in her efforts to give
writers opportunities to read publicly their writings, receive
monetary awards in recognition of their achievements, and be
celebrated for their creative talent.

On
Sunday, December 3, 2000, world-renowned writer, and
humanitarian Gwendolyn Brooks passed away at her Chicago,
Illinois residence; she was 83. Brooks is survived by her son,
Henry Blakely III, her daughter, Nora Brooks Blakely, and
countless family members, friends, and fellow poets. Her
husband, Henry Blakely, II, preceded her in death.

The legacy of
Gwendolyn Brooks consists of her immeasurable contribution to
literature as well as the cultural and social contributions made
by those she influenced in myriad ways.

Russell Simmons knows firsthand that
wealth is rooted in much more than the
stock
market. True wealth has more to do with
what's in your heart than what's in your
wallet. Using this knowledge, Simmons
became one of America's shrewdest
entrepreneurs, achieving a level of
success that most investors only dream
about. No matter how much material gain
he accumulated, he never stopped lending
a hand to those less fortunate. In
Super Rich, Simmons uses his rare
blend of spiritual savvy and
street-smart wisdom to offer a new
definition of wealth-and share timeless
principles for developing an unshakable
sense of self that can weather any
financial storm. As Simmons says, "Happy
can make you money, but money can't make
you happy."

The Apple Trees at Olema includes
work from Robert Hass's first five books—Field
Guide,
Praise,
Human Wishes,
Sun Under Wood, and
Time and Materials—as well as a
substantial gathering of new poems,
including a suite of elegies, a series of
poems in the form of notebook musings on the
nature of storytelling, a suite of summer
lyrics, and two experiments in pure
narrative that meditate on personal
relations in a violent world and read like
small, luminous novellas. From the
beginning, his poems have seemed entirely
his own: a complex hybrid of the lyric line,
with an unwavering fidelity to human and
nonhuman nature, and formal variety and
surprise, and a syntax capable of thinking
through difficult things in ways that are
both perfectly ordinary and really unusual.
Over the years, he has added to these
qualities a range and a formal restlessness
that seem to come from a skeptical turn of
mind, an acute sense of the artifice of the
poem and of the complexity of the world of
lived experience that a poem tries to
apprehend.

Hass's work is grounded in the beauty of the
physical world. His familiar landscapes—San Francisco, the
northern California coast, the Sierra high country—are vividly
alive in his work. His themes include art, the natural world,
desire, family life, the life between lovers, the violence of
history, and the power and inherent limitations of language. He
is a poet who is trying to say, as fully as he can, what it is
like to be alive in his place and time.

Somebody has to tell the truth sometime, whatever that truth may be. In this, her début full collection, Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie offers up a body of work that bears its scars proudly, firm in the knowledge that each is evidence of a wound survived. These are songs of life in all its violent difficulty and beauty; songs of fury, songs of love. 'Karma's Footsteps' brims with things that must be said and turns the volume up, loud, giving silence its last rites. "Ekere Tallie's new work 'Karma's Footsteps' is as fierce with fight songs as it is with love songs. Searing with truths from the modern day world she is unafraid of the twelve foot waves that such honesties always manifest. A poet who "refuses to tiptoe" she enters and exits the page sometimes with short concise imagery, sometimes in the arms of delicate memoir. Her words pull the forgottenamong us back into the lightning of our eyes.—Nikky Finney / Ekere Tallie Table

Tracy K. Smith, author of Life on Mars has been selected as the winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. In its review of the book, Publishers Weekly noted the collection's "lyric brilliance" and "political impulses [that] never falter." A New York Times review stated, "Smith is quick to suggest that the important thing is not to discover whether or not we're alone in the universe; it's to accept—or at least endure—the universe's mystery. . . . Religion, science, art: we turn to them for answers, but the questions persist, especially in times of grief. Smith's pairing of the philosophically minded poems in the book’s first section with the long elegy for her father in the second is brilliant." Life on Mars follows Smith's 2007 collection, Duende, which won the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, the only award for poetry in the United States given to support a poet's second book, and the first Essence Literary Award for poetry, which recognizes the literary achievements of African Americans.

The Body’s Question (2003) was her first published collection. Smith said Life on Mars, published by small Minnesota press Graywolf, was inspired in part by her father, who was an engineer on the Hubble space telescope and died in 2008.

On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake.

She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. She and her brothers live in a ramshackle house steeped in grief since their mother died giving birth to her last child. . . . What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.—

Ancient, Ancient collects the short fiction by Kiini Ibura Salaam, of which acclaimed author and critic Nalo Hopkinson writes, ''Salaam treats words like the seductive weapons they are. She wields them to weave fierce, gorgeous stories that stroke your sensibilities, challenge your preconceptions, and leave you breathless with their beauty.'' Indeed, Ms. Salaam's stories are so permeated with sensuality that in her introduction to

, Nisi Shawl, author of the award-winning Filter House, writes, ''Sexuality-cum-sensuality is the experiential link between mind and matter, the vivid and eternal refutation of the alleged dichotomy between them. This understanding is the foundation of my 2004 pronouncement on the burgeoning sexuality implicit in sf's Afro-diasporization. It is the core of many African-based philosophies. And it is the throbbing, glistening heart of Kiini's body of work. This book is alive. Be not afraid.''